Many different communities, including national leadership, defense, disaster management, emergency response, medical, and many others, desire effective and highly reliable conferencing services. Often, these communities need these conferencing services to be survivable under, and despite, the most challenging conditions, including attacks, weather emergencies, disasters, mass casualty incidents, epidemics, and even solar superstorms.
Although there are many conferencing architectures available, few are adequate to fully satisfy the urgent requirements of the communities. Traditional conferencing architectures are vulnerable to disruptions, especially single point failures, and very few provide inherently robust and resilient operations, especially when impacted by connectivity losses, equipment outages, damage, and other traditional impediments. Also, such traditional systems do not provide sufficiently robust and effective conference and system control and management (C&M) functionalities. These challenges are often compounded by security requirements, such as system key management and distribution, rejection of compromised end instruments, addition of authorized end instruments, and related needs.
For example, in star or hub-and-spoke architectures, the conferencing functionality is traditionally within the hub node. This centralized configuration offers relatively simple conferencing among, and C&M of, the directly accessible user end instruments, via their spokes or links, including centralized security management. However, this conventional star architecture is fragile. The single failure of a spoke or link, between a user end instrument and the hub, results in the loss of conference participation with that user. Furthermore, the single failure of the hub, which contains the conferencing functionality, results in the loss of the conference for all participating users, and likely also the loss of system C&M and security.
For example, and in contrast, in mesh or multicast conferencing architectures, all of the user end instruments broadcast their media to all of the other users' end instruments which are connected to the conference. This distributed and decentralized architecture may not be as vulnerable for the conferencing functionality. However, it is also susceptible to single points of failure, such as the single links between the various participating user end instruments. In addition, the multicast conference architecture still uses a vulnerable and typically centralized C&M and security management functionality. Further, features such as splitting, merging, kicking, and muting, for example, are especially problematic in mesh or multicast conferencing architectures. Furthermore, the multicast conference configuration presents significantly more complex challenges for conference and system C&M, and especially for any required security needs.
In addition, mesh or multicast conferencing architectures may be highly susceptible to unintended or detrimental information paths and flows, typically resulting in such impacts as audio echoes or oscillations, video ghost images, packet duplication, and many other concerns.
Regardless of the selection of these conventional conferencing architectures, when impacted by sudden destruction or loss of key nodes or communications links, they traditionally provide inadequate endurance or performance regarding immediate or rapid system or conference self-reconfiguration, self-repair, reconstitution, or other survivability capabilities.